The time will come—perhaps within the next century in North America—when a critical mass of the populace will recognize the folly of religious belief. A national and global consensus will form that religion is bunk. The scale will tip. Atheism will become the common understanding regarding whether deities and afterlives are real. Some isolated contrarians will persist, just as Flat-Earthers persist today, but the paradigm will have shifted. (Recall that the Flat Earth was the prevailing theory before early scientists discovered our planet is a sphere.)

American society will then enter the post-Christian era, which has already begun in parts of Western Europe where the majority of the population of some countries is nonreligious. When the global tipping point is reached, the planet’s entire population will enter the post-religion era. From that time forward, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, and other superstitions will be viewed as similarly quaint and intellectually primitive as sun-god worship is today. Democratic governments will follow their people—autocratic governments might lag since dictators often use religion to control their subjects.

Politics matter. It is through instruments of government that politics impact people. If politics were not infused with religious ideology, it would matter little that one individual has a personal theology different from that of another. We could live and let live. You like red, I like blue, mox nix.

But when governments create laws that encode the religious tenets of one segment of the population into enforced policies that apply to all citizens, we have a problem. No longer are your beliefs of no concern to me. Government creates a problem by imposing, by enforced laws, precepts of your religion on me. American Christians, Iranian Muslims, and other religionists who currently enjoy majority status in their countries would appreciate these sensitivities if their creeds became the minority and a similarly bigoted majority dominated them politically.

This is the first of nine upcoming posts describing “Reasons for Skepticism” derived from scientific discovery, not from wishful speculations about the supernatural. These will be followed by several “Reconciliation Theories” for bridging the growing chasm between science and religion.

1. Of many existing religions, which is the true one?

According to the Pew Research Center (2012), Christianity has 2.2 billion adherents, Islam 1.6 billion, and Hinduism 1.1 billion. At least ten other contemporary religions claim between 1 million and 500 million believers. Disparities among these religions are not insignificant—some are polytheistic and some posit reincarnation rather than a conscious afterlife. It can hardly be claimed that we all worship the same god. How certain are you that you happened to be born into the society in which the dominant religion (or your parents’ religion) is the one that believes in the true god?

This is an excerpt from The Reason Revolution: Atheism, Secular Humanism, and the Collapse of Religion by Dan Dana, a short, FREE e-book available at Smashwords, Goodreads, and Amazon ($0.99).
Readers are invited to post online reviews at the download site. Thank you!
More info: dandana.us/atheism
—> Follow The Reason Revolution on Twitter <—
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
A quiet revolution is underway. We hear no gunfire. No armies are engaged in battle. No violent overthrow of political regimes is occurring. This is a peaceful evolution, a slow-motion, though accelerating, transformation of a world order that has been in place for over 2,000 years.

Abraham, Jesus, and Mohammed were revolutionary leaders who established the contemporary monotheistic world order, supplanting the theologically fragmented era of Neolithic, Egyptian, and Greek religions. The three primary Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), combined with South Asian (Dharmic) and East Asian (Taoist) faiths, comprise a supernaturalist bloc of belief systems that has held sway to the present, but is beginning to lose its grip on the hearts and minds of people.

By definition, supernaturalists contend there exist forces beyond scientific understanding of the laws of nature. The Reason Revolution is occurring as the supernaturalist bloc yields to atheistic naturalism. Advancement and dissemination of knowledge gained through science is the engine of this revolution.